We ended up taking the approach we have always taken at JTV to solve every problem: we hired or repurposed smart engineers to work on our mobile apps who didn’t necessarily have a ton (read: any) experience. Our philosophy has always been to hire talented engineers with strong programming backgrounds and let them work on areas of the company they are interested in, regardless of domain experience. Subsequently, we grew our mobile teams to 2 iOS engineers, 1 Android engineer, and 1 mobile product designer.

Generally, someone doesn’t become CEOs unless she has a high sense of purpose and cares deeply about the work she does. In addition, a CEO must be accomplished enough or smart enough that people will want to work for her. Nobody sets out to be a bad CEO, run a dysfunctional organization, or create a massive bureaucracy that grinds her company to a screeching halt. Yet no CEO ever has a smooth path to a great company. Along the way, many things go wrong and all of them could have and should have been avoided.

When people in my company would complain about something or other being broken such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. Every problem in the company was indeed my fault. As the founding CEO, every hire and every decision that the company ever made happened under my direction. Unlike a hired gun that comes in and blames all of the problems on the prior regime, there was literally nobody for me to blame.